Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
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Ergo why the elite love democracies - they hold the power and keys while the people think they're the ones in control.
Privatize the gains, publicize the losses.
Divide and conquer the people through the illusory red team versus blue team paradigm, all the while everyone is robbed blind with nary a hope for real change.
I hang out on HN fairly often and haven't seen a single royalist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965530
Other than that, I agree that HN just looks like a healthy mix of democrats, (crypto-)libertarians, and an occasional conservative.
Kind of put a different light on the whole thing.
http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html
About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6729736
So they exist. Not sure how widespread it is, but I would also imagine that it's a larger group than would be apparent simply because most folks don't want to out themselves as "anti-democratic" the most ultimate of sins.
"I've settled on parvumianism (to coin a neologisim): in favor of small political units in which the appropriate political mechanism can be chosen and meaningfully consented to."
I think you are right though that it would be incorrect to label anyone as anything unless they explicitly stated as such.
I'm fairly agnostic about the best way to organize politically, beyond coming to the conclusion that if a government is to meaningfully derive its powers from the consent of the governed, then, depending on how strong a culture there is, there can't be very many governed.
Whether you agree with it's plausibility or not, I think that in and of itself is a worthy goal.
If you get Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius all in the same century, you're lucky. You could have just as easily gotten five Neros and five Caligulas in a row, or an alternating series of Catholics and Protestants who try to kill everyone who was loyal to the previous monarch.
With a democracy, you can't optimize the society to the same degree of perfection as you can with philosopher kings, but you also get to avoid the worst crashes. Do you want extreme performance or do you want reliability? Hint: human lives are supposed to be many times more important than records in your database.
A great point; I like to think of Democracy as median filtering, it smooths extremes.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa...
What a circus.
Peter Thiel is behind a good proportion of anything these individuals want to do which is interesting in and of itself to me.
http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/10070-guidelines-for-na...
Geeks tried very patiently to explain mathematics to him in the comments.
Conventionally, though, these powers are used only through the advice of the Prime Minister, since the Prime Minister has some degree of democratic legitimacy (although interestingly enough, the Prime Minister is not elected directly by the people. The Prime Minister is Prime Minister only because he is the leader of the party that was chosen by the Crown to form government) and the Crown does not, since the Governor-General is appointed by the Monarch, with the advice of the Prime Minister, and the Monarch is obviously a hereditary position. Now, if the Crown were given democratic legitimacy, say through an elected head of state, suddenly the position is empowered and the stability of the system is called into question. Maybe the Crown decides not to sign a bill into law, or dismisses a minister, or dissolves Parliament for no reason, the Crown could say that he (or she) has the mandate of the people to do so, which is obviously bad for the country.
I'm not saying its necessarily bad for the Crown to be empowered like that, just that the system is stable and strong as it is, and it is not broken, so why fix it? It throws a lot of the political system into question and unbalances the delicate balance of our constitution.
A few I can remember with constitutional monarchy: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
What's more troubling is that there's very little history of constitutional monarchies reverting to absolutism and staying that way for a long time. On the other hand, many post-Soviet USSR republics (including Russia) provide plenty of democratic presidents turning into dictators.
It does. And investigating why geeks are into HBD or nootropics could probably be an interesting article. I wondered about it. Maybe you could even take a look where this disappointment with the regular media/science/gov is coming from.
this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area.
Haha. Or inflate your own importance and call people racist. That will probably, and sadly, get even more clicks (while fuelling disapointment with the media).
However, I don't see how many 'human biodiversity' (HBD) claims are not racist - that is, they make claims about individuals based on the social construct of race though they ostensibly mean to discuss 'biology.'
What I find amazing is that people are surprised that group differences have arisen over the last 50,000 years. Gene-culture coevolution makes it seem inevitable that different cultures will favor different traits. Therefore you're going to see some average differences.
There are obvious examples, a more polygamous society where women do more of the work (eg female farming systems) with lower paternal investment, might favor different traits to those where there is State control, monogamy and greater paternal investment.
I'd recommend that you read some posts by Steve Hsu, Peter Frost, or 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution'.
Here was his chance to actually shed some light "on the psyche of contemporary tech culture."
Same with the popularity of nootropics. I know of very few groups (body builders, athletes, and geeks may actually be the only ones) so interested in boosting performance. This is interesting. Shed the light on the psyche.
Does those two tie into the disappointment with the mainstream news and opinion outlets, contemporary scientific institutions, and governance? I'd venture a yes.
Isn't that interesting? Just to me?
Maybe I'll write that article one day then. His loss.
That this makes them cross the moral event horizon for many people does not make it (a) unimportant or (b) untrue.
It is the person who cannot convince the world of their position, and then comes to the conclusion the problem is the world.
In practice, at least in the last many decades, we have seen what happens when special interest groups get to write their own laws and regulations behind the scenes...often getting voted on in Congress before there's time to even read the bills.
Maybe the solution is to somehow 'democratize' the special interest groups? Well, I've basically advocated for awhile now that we need a larger group of representatives. (it seems ridiculous to expect a few hundred elected lawmakers to regulate the government.
Either that or we just need smaller government but if we want the government to regulate as much as it does in modern times, it's going to continue evolving as technology and industries evolve and that's one reason why special interest groups have gained so much power. They serve a purpose in government. It's just not transparent and 'refereed' like it should be.
The whole "let's have lots of micro-states with easy exit" condition proposed by these advocates here sounds borderline quasi-plausible, IF somehow you could get that going to begin with (not bloody likely)... but even from a purely economic perspective, the transaction costs in choosing a new place to live and moving there are very high, so one would suspect this layout would lead to inefficient results. (and that's economic efficiency, which includes your overall well-being.) And who enforces that you get to up and leave whenever you want, anyway? The other micro-states, using WAR?
A polycentric legal order would have people living in one area who might subscribe to any number of different private security and arbitration firms.
Perhaps you could say their different agencies come to some sort of an agreement in regards to disputes or conflicts between the laws subscribed to by different people. But where such agreements exist they would be made for the mutual benefit of the corporations and not necessarily their customers. To me the end result still looks a lot like a state, just one in which cartels stand in for governments.
The big problem with the micro state idea is military power. Much of the stability apparent in the modern world is really down to the military might of regional powers. Leaving libertarian fantasy land of peacefully trading small states, what seems more probable and historically accurate is feuding for supremacy by any means.
Despite all the computer oriented techno wankery around here, the biggest value of the continental United States is still the Mississippi watershed. Anyone who controls it will be a world power. You can't realistically break it up into stable micro states.
Now it is true that a right of absolute personal freedom is incompatible with democracy, but it is also incompatible with pretty much all other forms of political structure, not to mention most physical laws, the existence of birth and death, and everyone else's right of absolute personal freedom.
Also, about the 'easy exit' conditions, I do wonder who is going to tell the royals to stick to the conditions if they decide to ban folk from leaving a particular state.
Obviously any sort of power, democratic or not, is against "freedom" in the general sense. In reality, you need some sort of power structure, so the question is whether the democratic one is better than any other.
Most people who put a lot of emphasis on the alleged conflict between freedom and democracy seem to assume a laughably simplistic definition of democracy taken straight out of early-to-mid-20th-century political philosophy. Basically, when they say "democracy", they mean "majority rule". And of course, if getting 51% of the vote were all there was to democracy, I would wholeheartedly agree that it's a nasty thing.
But political philosophy is one of the fastest moving sub-disciplines of philosophy, and most people who take philosophy and/or political theory courses in the first 2 years of college (or read introductory books by themselves) are unfortunately not given a real taste of the latest developments in democratic theory. This makes them pick up an outdated, straw-man notion of democracy (anybody read Robert Dahl?) and argue passionately against it. But if that's what they're doing, they aren't really adding anything to what Schumpeter said 60 years ago. What a waste of precious brain cycles.
Most influential political philosophers of the English-speaking world in the last half century (Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas) refuse to equate democracy with "obey whomever 51% of the population votes for". To them, democracy is all about giving the voice of reason a chance to be heard, even if it means departing from political systems that currently pass for democracies. They usually call for much more powerful constitutional constraints on democracy so that the most important human rights become extremely difficult to override even if you have a supermajority. Like all tools, democracy needs to be limited in its scope. If you have a hammer... you know how it goes.
I agree that there are many interesting developments in political philosophy on the nature of democracy. The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it.
One of the best ideas I got from reading Marx (which also shows that people who read Moldbug tend to read widely, hey) is that political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. All that matters is the living breathing primates that inhabit our political systems, the stuff those primates have, and whether the primates are happy. Bad political systems are bad because they cause cruelty to animals.
"Freedom" is simply a matter of the monkeys being able to do what they want and not feeling like they are being bossed around by bigger monkeys. "Equality" is a matter of ensuring that the low status monkeys don't feel too low status.
As for "democracy" - well, it turns out that monkeys are generally happier living in industrial economies (with their abundant iPads, cappuccinos, etc), but that such economies require huge centralised bureaucracies to run effectively. The theatre of frequent elections is a convenient way to make every monkey feel like an alpha monkey whose opinion is important and not simply a well-pampered slave.
Both the first year college students with their "laughably simplistic definition of democracy" and "Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas" with their highly nuanced definition of democracy are in the same category as people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists. They have a fun intellectual pastime, and all power to them. But the latest mind-expanding discoveries in category theory have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. (The best they can hope for is that some enlightened and energetic project manager decides to let them rewrite part of the system in Rails.) Likewise, the latest advances in democratic theory have no impact on the people staffing the enormous bureaucracies which run advanced economies. At least the Haskell guys can write Tetris apps in 4 lines of code to show off. It'd be cool if Rawls would gather 100,000 followers to some private island to test-drive his own political system, but it's unlikely to happen. (On a side note, did you hear that seasteaders are evil fascist brogrammers and that charter cities are neoliberal colonialism?)
I'd actually be glad to hear you correct me and tell me that no, actually most Western democracies hand out books by the authors you cited to civil service employees, who hold regular workplace seminars on how to best implement such ideas and bring real democracy (tm) to the world.
EDIT: I realise that I never responding to the grandparent question about freedom and democracy. Well, there are many forms of "freedom" and democracy is certainly compatible with some of them. But I note that democratic states, lacking strong leaders with ability to make more than token cuts to government spending, tend to show a monotonic increase in the number of government departments that decide to regulate ever more and more aspects of life. The thing with regulation is that every individual item of regulation sounds sensible (how can we let people get away with poorly fitted child car seats? the humanity!) but over time people forget that a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone and b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
An even bigger issue is the fact that if you are a paycheck employee (especially if you have a mortgage, debt and a family) you are in many ways a comfortably-off serf. An ever-growing government takes an ever-growing share of your salary, and since taxpayers are close to being an electoral minority in many countries (did you snark at Mitt Romney's 48% comments?) you are likely to spend ever more of your limited time on Earth working hard to fund TSA agents, drone strikes and the healthcare of aging pensioners. An anglo-saxon freeman had more personal autonomy. At least if you're reading this site you can make plans to build a bootstrapped passive income and move to Thailand.
In regards to paternalism (laws regulating personal safety, nutrition, private health, family relations, etc...) I also believe Singapore tends to fare worse, even if it's manifested in different ways (e.g., there may not be laws against trans fat, but there is compulsory military service, near impossibility of being allowed to live alone in an apartment, extreme difficulty of private car ownership -- which moots the discussion of car seats, etc...). As I a firearm owner, I find California (where I live) and New York gun laws to be idiotic -- but I'm pretty sure my "collection" (couple of rifles and a pistol) would mean death penalty in Singapore.
I think one place where you may have a point is the case of entitlements: it is indeed rare for democracies to have significantly cut some aspects welfare state, namely middle-class entitlement like medicare and social security (welfare programs for the truly poor do get cut frequently, but they are actually less fiscally burdensome than the middle class entitlement).
However, there have been cases of other regulations being significantly loosened, e.g., airline deregulation is something I am quite grateful for.
> people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists ... have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code.
Interesting observation, and yeah, it definitely smells like Marx. But I'd say it's too early to reach a conclusion like that. It's not unusual for mainstream philosophical ideas of X'th century to have little impact on the real world until well into X+1'th century or even later, and that's under favorable socioeconomic circumstances.
Similarly, programming language theory debated on the Haskell lists tends to "trickle down", after a while, into various other languages and frameworks. 10 or 20 or 30 years later, someone writes a PHP framework that is indirectly inspired by some of them. It takes time, that's all.
I'd be very surprised if political ideas developed in the 1990s, for example, came to fruition anytime before 2090 or so. And the same applies to the neoreactionary ideas of the 2000s. Even if they're as promising as their advocates say they are, it's going to take no less time to port them to the real world. So I don't think your impatience is justified.
> a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone
Ah, the usual baseless romanticism about the past. This is what I find the most disagreeable about neoreactionaries. If you want to build a better future, leave your unrealistic notions of history at the door.
> b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
Did you actually go back in time and ask them whether they really enjoyed it? Or are you just trying to force everyone else to be "free" (hello, Rousseau) regardless of whether they want to be?
I don't have any problem with a bunch of consenting adults who want to build their own country in the middle of an ocean. It's their money and their own lives to spend as they see fit. But I don't think anybody has the right to drag a single non-consenting person into a copy of Plato's ideal city.
Most people are just fine being comfortable serfs in an industrial society, whether you like it or not. And that's what really prevents the speedy implementation of any political philosophy, whether yours or mine. As I see it, you're not really trying to fix this issue, but merely rewrite history to make it look like a non-issue. It's a fascinating intellectual exercise, but good luck getting your rewritten history merged into Upstream Reality.
The word "democracy" is used a lot. Usually people aren't mindful of what an arbitrary term like democracy represents in context. They have static perception. Unfortunately, due to the way a lot of these subjects are taught, most people seem to grow up believing that [governmental change in support of human freedom/justice] has reached its climax, that the end-all-be-all form of it has effectively been reached. People then fail to care about seeking even the simplest of changes to the system itself. They stay mentally contained to a philosophical box.
The US federal system as it now stands in loose terms, for instance, is a centralized, binary, non-preferential democratic republic. Paired with its form of taxation, this system has resulted in one of the most top-heavy, enriched, powerful, imprisoning, corporate oligarchical-like governments the world has known. Wars of luxury start happening with relative ease, just as they did under more totalitarianism and deluded republics. The feeding frenzy has never been better. As long as its "citizenry" is lulled into believing in an "enemy" and doesn't have to feel the weight of its violent force that affects others, this will continue. They'll keep throwing their own freedom and that of their neighbor down the drain in support of revenge, clinging to the hopes of another election. One of the only ways to conscientiously object peacefully is the withdrawal of funding, opting for social NGOs instead. Even that is a colossal task. A simple nonviolent action against the status quo of taxation may land a person caged.
Neomonarchism:
Neomonarchism as a reaction to a growing [corporate-war-prison-surveillance state (sprinkled with democracy)] doesn't make much logical sense. I doubt most neomonarchists want more freedom. Anyone who wants more freedom and liberation should tread in the other direction: away from these extremely centralized, top-heavy systems of today and yesteryear. To empower individuals more is to effectively disempower the ability of individuals and groups to rule over one another (who rule at the hand of a sword or by laws inherently backed by violence).
Whenever I hear someone who claims to like liberty preach against democracy in favour of reaction and monarchy, I feel they miss that when classical liberal enlightenment thinkers (who were the first to speak of individual liberty, advocate for free trade, property rights, and abolition of compulsory membership in guilds) critized democracy, the word democracy didn't mean what it means today: it meant direct and unlimited Athenian-style democracy, that lead to Socrates' death.
To add to this, they mistake traditionalism/conservatism of Edmund Burke (in a way, the intellectual founding father of the US republican party and modern Tories) who happened to criticize French revolution with actual continental reactionary politics (of Hegel, Metternich, De Maistre, etc...) Here's a tendency to explain Burke's support of American Revolution followed by opposition to the French revolution for a change in his views: in reality, they were consistent -- he was appalled by the Jacobins, but supported constitutional law, equality of freedom (arguing for emancipation of Catholics and against imperialism/subjugation of India), and so forth...
When reactionaries speak against democracy they do so for entirely different reasons than when US founding fathers (or the philosophers that inspired them) warned against democracy. The reasons reactionary thinkers from Plato onwards despised democracy had more to do with the fact that they saw democratic cities as having _too much_ freedom. They absolutely despised private property, trade, and the middle/upper-middle classes (all of which are likely sacred with these neo-reactionaries).
Their idea of monarchy was far more similar to Byzantine absolutism, as opposed to constitutional monarchy of e.g., Franz Josef of Austro Hungarian Empire (who, incidentally, also despised nationalism and presciently saw it as an incredibly destructive force) or even "enlightened absolutism" of Fredrick The Great.
So here's a "radical" thought: despite all of its flaws, limited (de-facto or de-jure) constitutional government (a.k.a. "rule of law" in English speaking countries, and "rechstaat" in German speaking countries), genuine social _and_ economic liberalism (aka "classical liberalism"), and democracy have (overall) greatly increased human liberty, happiness, and productivity. There's tons of rooms for debate -- but I'd imagine most honest left-liberals would much prefer to live in, e.g., US under Reagan or UK under Thatcher than in Fidel's Cuba, while most honest libertarians/conservatives would much prefer to live in social-democratic countries of Western Europe/Scandinavia than in Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, or Chile under Pinochet[1]. Conservatives may wax enthusiastically about low taxes in semi-authoritarian Singapore, but I'm not sure if that enthusiasm would continue if they realized that the country also punishes firearm possession by death.
Personally, I hope that a broader centrist liberal party emerges in the US (which would also include libertarians as part of its big tent coaliation -- Reagan and Thatcher parroted libertarian ideas, while expanding perhaps most anti-libertarian agenda, namely the War On Drugs). The NSA spying scandal was awful, but one of its results was the begging of a left-right coalition focused on civil liberties.
So in all, I think the idea that rule by a new generation of philosopher kings will somehow make us more free seems silly: it's ease to get caught up in the aesthetics of the idea, but it's bizzare to think as to how this may actually strengthen the rights to life, liberty, and property.
[1] Obviously all sane people would not want to live in Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, or North Korea -- but totalitarianism is a far more rare phenomena than "mere" authoritarianism and isn't really a danger at this point: its bloody record speaks for itself.
Criticism of democracy as "mob rule" don't really apply to modern meaning of democracy. Absolute monarchy (or other types of absolute government) will -- in practice -- lead to far less actual liberty than we see today.
Most of the people I know, that lived back in the day, openly say that life under the previous regime was better. A lot better.
Obviously, members of the current oligarchy, trade union professionals and members of the current parties, always try to pass across Estado Novo as some sort of totalitarian nightmare, forgetting that they at the time most of them were pushing for die-hard communism. The country these people looked up to as a model was communist Albania...
The 2nd Portuguese Republic started as military dictatorship. In 1933 it became a constitutional system, with a constitution sanctioned by popular vote. Contrary to what people normally think, Salazar wasn't the head of State. The head of State was the President of the Republic - elected by popular vote up to the fifties, by which time the system changed to an electoral college, due to communist sabotage and violent agitation during the presidential elections. The PoR was elected for seven year periods and had the power to appoint the Government, particularly the President of the Council of Ministers (Prime-minister). That's how things worked when Salazar died: the President consulted whomever he saw fit and decided to appoint Marcello Caetano, which, by the way, had a leftist reputation in more conservative circles. There were three Presidents during the 2nd Republic.
Salazar proposed his own resignation a few times to the Presidents. However, Salazar was an absolutely brilliant statesman, besides being an extremely competent and scrupulous with money and finances. He single-handedly assumed the jobs of the ministries of War and Foreign Affairs during the 2nd World War. It's him Portugal owes being saved from that catastrophe. To an extent so does Spain. The people loved him and that is undeniable. Even recently, no more than ten years ago, there was a silly tv show to the purpose of electing the greatest portuguese person of all times. Salazar won. This is hard to understand without knowing the state of the country left by the 1st Republic. A lot of people became salazarists because of the simple fact that they started to get their pensions paid regularly.
Anyway, as far as repression goes, it's undeniable that censorship existed. For several reasons it was never abolished, even though there were plans for it. In the establishment of the regime, it was deemed necessary to control agitation and maintain order. Then came World War 2, an extremely delicate situation that warranted the control provided by press censorship to maintain the cooperative neutrality with the Allies Salazar wanted. Then, when finally there seemed to be a glimpse of an opening in the 50s, started the soviet and chinese-sponsored terrorist operations in Angola, with the 1961 massacre in the North. Beyond this point, press censorship was used mainly control enemy propaganda, which was mainly all communist. Still it was a known fact and the government didn't hide it or denied it. Compare this to the sort of veiled censorship practiced in the UK but especially in America, in matters pertaining the wars in which they recently were involved.
Salazar, and other important figures of the 2nd Republic, weren't against democracy as such. They were against parliamentary democracy with parties. They were against political parties and were against control of the executive branch by the legislative branch. They felt the stability and long-term vision necessary to govern a country can't be provided by changing governments and policy every four years. I think they were right. Reality proves so, at least in the case of Portugal. That doesn't mean they didn't felt popular legitimation unimportant. Like I said, the President was elected, and so were the deputies of the National Assembly. The difference was that the government didn't have to have a majority in this assembly to govern. The trust of the President was enough.
This isn't more widely known because of communist propaganda. What people in the US need to understand is that leftist over here isn't quite the same as over there. Here we have an active and parliamentary represented Communist party. There is even another one to the left of it. As usual, they play the poor, worker, green, lgbt, etc, "progressist" cards. But they never say what they actually would do if they obtained power. Presumably, they would implement a communist system like all the others. In fact, we had a glimpse of it in 1975 when they managed to obtain power for the larger part of the year. They nationalised all industry and arrested or chased all the capitalists off the country, essentially decapitating portuguese economy, that never recovered since. The country would soon be requesting IMF assistance in 1977. It did so for two more times, in 1983 and 2012. For comparison, bear in mind that in 1974, just before the coup that ended the 2nd Republic, Portugal had, apart from several foreign currency reserves, a reserve of 800 tonnes worth of fine gold. The escudo was a stable a strong currency. The commercial scale was balanced. All this despite sustaining military defence operations in Africa. Portuguese economy was rapidly growing, both in Europe and Africa, at about 6 to 8 percent. Three years later, it was bankrupt. They also immediately created a political police under military control called the COPCON, that issued capture warrants with the name field blank... Thousands were arrested for being "reactionary", meaning they weren't communist. The public administration, from state bureaucracy to teachers, was, as they said, "sanitised" from people that weren't "progressive" enough. The previous regime PIDE/DGS was more akin to an intelligence and counter-intelligence service. However, it couldn't arbitrarily keep people arrested. Although the police could deduce accusation, the suspects had to be presented to a judge, and a judicial process would be open. It wasn't anymore repressive than the McCarthy's era FBI. It has to be understood that the regime was highly academic and legalist. Most of the Government figures were university Law professors. Everything was done strictly according to the law. Arbitrary and irregular actions like COPCON's blank named capture warrants would never ever be permitted in any circumstance.
Basically, the whole of the political spectrum in Portugal today is leftist. The people on the so called parties on the right, all have extreme-left backgrounds. A paradigmatic example is the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso, member of the portuguese social-democrat PSD (one of the big two parties). In the 70's he was proper fist-in-the-air maoist[1], part of the MRPP - Portuguese Workers' Communist Party (this isn't the orthodox soviet communist party PCP, we had lots of them besides the 'real' one). Ironic isn't it? The preamble of the current Portuguese Constitution still says that Portugal is on it's way towards a socialist society... Contrary to the 1933 one, this constitution wasn't subject to popular vote. It was imposed as "the will of the portuguese people" to the people. A lot of the structural problems affecting Portugal can't be solved without constitutional amendment, something that is and has always been opposed by the left, led by the Socialist Party (the other of the big two parties). Only in the eighties was private banking allowed by constitutional amendment, for example.
The truth is, parliamentary democracy was bad for Portugal. It is true that it could have been different. But it was what it was. Presently, what happens is that the big two alternate in fucking up the country, raising taxes, privatising everything (how things change, heh? But now they need the money) in ruinous deals for the treasury, while the communists, who control the unions, make sure protests don't go out of hand, being given places all over the public sector for their cronies in return. Everybody wins. Except the taxpayer, of course. Why don't people vote differently? Well, because the media is in bed with the regime, and to campaign you need money. Same as everywhere I guess.
Salazar used to call the 2nd Republic an organic democracy. Besides the National Assembly, there was the Corporative Chamber, where all the significant trades and industries were represented. All laws passed by the Assembly required consultation of this chamber. This is reminiscent of the Courts of so called absolutist monarchy in Portugal, which gathered representatives of trades and industry, clerical representatives, nobles (military), and the municipalities. This was put an end to with the civil war[2] in the nineteenth century between absolutists (called miguelists, because they supported D. Miguel) and constitutionalists that wanted a constitutional monarchy. The constitutionalists won, but not without heavy international support from financiers and foreign government in the form of money and mercenaries. However, the wounds open at the time haven't really healed and they still divide monarchists to this day.
[1]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GfHGyLKkpFQ/Tn2RrRJMcHI/AAAAAAAAA1...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Civil_War
EDIT: corrected the right century of the civil war. Not eighteenth but nineteenth.
I clearly understand what you said about leftist in US vs. leftist elsewhere as well: both the republicans and democrats in the US would in many countries be more akin to a fairly tiny party that called itself liberal and had only a few seats in the parliament (e.g., in today's Russia the entire US political spectrum would likely fall into Yavlinsky's party/list which hasn't had any seats at all in the Duma since 2007).
Given a choice between communism (even communism under a "progressive" cloak -- Venezuela is a clear example of how that played out!) and Salazar, I also think that most reasonable people would pick Salazar in a heartbeat. Communism and socialism almost by definition require totalitarianism, which is why the last remaining totalitarian state is North Korea, with other states getting progressively less authoritarian in lockstep to them becoming less communist. Chinese citizens are for the most part more free than Cubans -- e.g., Chinese and Vietnamese citizens are permitted to leave their countries, while immigration is extremely difficult for any Cuban medical doctor. Cubans, however, are more free today than my family was under Kruschev and Brezhnev -- my parents couldn't even travel to other communist countries for scientific conferences until 1989.
However, I was not comparing Estado Novo to its alternatives at the time in Portugal or even the current mess (I believe one of the leaders of the coup against Caetano said that he wouldn't have overthrown him if he saw what came out in the end): what I see as an example of "decent" social democracy would be Sweden -- private property and capitalism, but with a somewhat more expansive welfare state. To be clear I do not in any way endorse an expansive welfare state: the taxation needed to sustain such a state chokes businesses (I am not at all surprised that Volvo is owned by Ford and Saab by GM) and the handouts create artificial externalities which ultimately lead to less individual liberty ("we gave you free healthcare, so now we will regulate what you, what you smoke, and force you [as in France] to see a doctor on a routine basis").
I also realize that this isn't a fair comparison: 1930s Portugal was a multi-ethnic state with overseas colonies, yet with living conditions (in terms of literacy, standard of living, but perhaps not infrastructure) even in metropolitan Portugal that resembled today's developing world. To compare it with a highly homogeneous and wealthy Scandinavian country of today is indeed quite absurd.
The colonial wars also complicate things quite a bit -- I personally do find it ironic that Portugal was condemned for them, while France (which acted with greater brutality both in its colonies and against domestic dissent) got a free pass.
I also do not in any way mean to slight the enormous advances in standard of living that happened under Estado Novo, as well as neutral Portugal's role as an escape route for refugees.
Yet, the "neo-reactionaries" are for the most part Americans which is what I find insane: Western-style liberal democracy is an unattainable dream for most. I first learned the word liberalism from my grandmother, who described it as only a faint memories from her grandfather -- a merchant of first guild (highest title that could be held by a Jewish capitalist) in Imperial Russia -- who supported a liberal party in 1905. I find it crazy that any American or North-West European would want to give that system up for the neo-ancien regime.
I don't know any Portuguese today who thinks that Portugal was better off under the previous incompetent kleptocracy. They may have objections to today's government, but Salazar was both malevolent and stupid, a particularly poor combination.
It's a handful of loud mouthed guys who have the phone number of a reporter who was looking for an article to write.
However, in normal speech racism is defined as believing that human are separated into different races and that there is a hierarchy of superiority, usually with your own race being on top of it.
There is nothing wrong with helping usual target and/or victims of racial or other hate to offset the potential effects said hate. Unless you of course believe safe shelters for women are inherently sexist. In which case you are just old fashioned rasist slash chauvinist.
Really, I think your definition is in practice useless. The reality of the word is that when identity politics are involved and people hear something they don't like, they scream "racist".
Here's just one ~$4 billion example of tax payer money spent under the assumption that differences in loan approval rates were racist and not related to other factors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/us/farm-loan-bias-claims-o...
Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. Pages 517-554 in C. L. Frisby & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology. New York: Wiley.
www.edge.org/response-detail/10376
As was evidence by the article on the nature of psychopath psychologist, he didn't commit an act of violence, despite his predisposition of it.
Many, many subtle social effects can contribute to worse performance of subjects.
Likewise I often see 'genetic' argument used to justify the status quo. I.e. the ones in power are in power because they have better genetic material and not just because they are good at exploiting current system or just plain lucky.
Especially when your non-ethnonationalists include the likes of Steve Sailer...
[1]http://habitableworlds.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/visualizing-...
Btw, there was a prime minister of Bulgaria who was also a king by birthright. Talk about elective monarchy.